TWO UNIQUE PERFORMANCES

Friday, October 16 & Saturday, October 17, 2026

250 EXPRESS: AN AMERICAN PIANO JOURNEY

Two nights. Two pianists. Two unique programs. Two hundred and fifty years of America through music. Melody Puller and Matt Goodrich highball across the land to explore the America that only a piano can conjure: Delta spirituals and New Orleans dance halls, ragtime parlors and moonlit landscapes, Roman fountains and Andean fireworks. Familiar names and rediscovered composers share the bill, curated so each piece changes the light on the next, with stories about the music told straight from the stage. 

One  hour before each performance, Puller and Goodrich are joined onstage by Rory Creigh, Ph.D., for a preconcert roundtable exploring the evening's program.

Friday, October 16 at 7 pm - 250 EXPRESS: EXPEDITION 

All aboard! 250 Express roars out of the station with Copland’s foot-stomping hoedown and runs wide open—out across the frontier, down into the bayou, through moonlit woods, onto a rackety factory floor. Twelve composers, twelve facets of the American sound, all celebrating the instrument our country did its musical dreaming on. At the end of the line, a Wizard of Oz Fantasy for four hands blows the doors off Little Carnegie to take us home. Twelve stops. One wild ride across America. (Encore performance of March 2026 program)

Saturday, October 17 at 7 pm - 250 EXPRESS: SOUVENIRS

All aboard again! 250 Express glides out on Barber’s nostalgia and takes the inside track. Where the first evening chased the horizon, this one turns for home, through smoky blues and a strutting tango, a summer night humming with fireflies and crickets, a manuscript lost for decades heard at last. Then the newest voices step up—prize-winning, fresh from our own century—and the last miles blaze past. Twelve more stops. And once more, because there's no place like it: Dorothy's road home.